Case study, systems and workflow
The system was not the problem
The situation
Shield Life came to us to replace a project management system. The brief was procurement: choose the better tool and implement it.
The diagnosis said otherwise. The pain the business felt was not produced by the software. It was produced by a workflow with unclear ownership, where work moved between people without anyone holding it.
What we did
- Tested the brief before spending against it. We examined how work actually moved through the business rather than accepting the stated requirement.
- Diagnosed the workflow and found the handoffs, the queues and the points where accountability lapsed.
- Defined the roles so that each step in the process had an owner rather than an assumption.
- Designed the to-be workflow the business would actually run, then tested the tooling question against it.
- Presented three costed options with the trade-offs stated openly, so the decision belonged to the client rather than to the consultant.
The outcomes
The brief was corrected before money was spent
A system replacement that would not have solved the problem was stopped before procurement.
Roles were defined
Ownership at each step, which is what the business was actually missing.
A designed to-be workflow
The process the business runs on was designed deliberately rather than inherited.
The discipline behind it
Before you replace a system, find out whether the system is the problem
The cheapest project is the one you talk a client out of.